Audio in video games are just as important as graphics and models. In some of the projects I have been involved in this trimester I have had to source audio assets for my games. Unfortunately I have no skills in creating these audio assets, but there are a many online databases of music, sound effects and more that is available to choose from that you can either pay for, or use for free. Some of my favourite websites to use are newgrounds.com for music and freesound.org for sound effects.

In my first project I had to make a 2D game where you control a spaceship. For this game, I needed an upbeat tune that went for approximately 1-2 minutes long. The tune itself didn't have to loop, but if it did it would be a bonus. After searching newgrounds for a bit, I found I nice little tune called "My Pixelated UFO". The song is 1-2 minutes long but doesn't loop perfectly, but on repeat the end does blend into the start quite smoothly.

I also needed a shooting sound effect for this game. Because the ship uses a front mounted laser, I looked on freesound.org for some laser shooting sounds. After searching a little bit, I found a good one that was short and solid. When I imported it into Unity and wired it up to fire with my laser canon, I didn't like how low pitched the sound was. So inside the unity inspector I changed the pitch to 1.3, which meant the sound would play a little faster, as well as little more high pitched. This felt much more suited to the feel of the game. I also found an explosion sound effect for the death of the ship on freesound.org.

In the third project, I didn't have to find as many sound effects as I did for the first project. I did create the main menu which required a click sound when pressing a button. Once again, I went to freesound.org and searched for a UI click that I thought sounded okay. Once I found one, I imported it into Unity and attached it to my button, and I had a working click sound effect on my UI buttons.

Audio is extremely important for setting the feel for a scene or just giving the player audio feedback. I would like to learn how to create some of my own audio assets, but until then, there are a lot of websites out there that offer royalty free sound effects and music.